Microsoft updates Office Windows app with new features for Excel in Fast Ring

Microsoft yesterday rolled out a new update for Office desktop app with a couple of new features and improvements. The latest update advances the app to version 1810 (build 10920.20003) and adds new features to Excel, improves the other Office apps and fixes the glitches discovered in the previous release.

Office Excel for Windows comes with ideas feature that allows users to discover more about your data. It can look for patterns in your data and use to create intelligent, personalized, suggestions. It’s a useful feature that would make it easier for you to analyze data that can be used for creating an interesting visualisation.

To get started, you would need to open Excel, navigate to spreadsheet screen and make sure that the clean tabular data in the grid is there. You will notice that the Ideas button is there in the Home tab.

Excel is also picking up support for dynamic array support that will help you write a single formula and see a list of values. For example, Microsoft is allowing customers to use the SORT function to sort a list. It’s part of the functions that Microsoft recently added to Excel. Similarly, the UNIQUE function helps you remove duplicate items from a list and you can also filter the list with the FILTER function key.

“With dynamic arrays you can write a single formula that returns a list of values. One formula, many values. And because Excel’s grid now understands arrays, we’ve added amazing new functions that work with lists,” the changelog reads.

Here’s what fixed and improved in this release:

Word: The update comes with various performance and it has also fixed some bugs to address the stability issues.

Excel: Microsoft has also fixed an “Upload Blocked” error message. Microsoft explains that the error message shows up when the app saved something automatically. This update also fixed a crashing issue that occurred when the user switched from a Pivot to Pie Chart.

PowerPoint: An issue with copy & paste of slides has been addressed.

Outlook: Microsoft has addressed some unknown issues with Focused Inbox.

Access: This update also comes with fixes for refreshing SQL views in the new linked table manager.

Project: Microsoft has fixed an issue that results in crashing of AutoFilter in Team planner.